Word: yeltsin
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...suggested recently that the shame of being the odd man out when G8 leaders convene on his turf in July might help bring Russia's President Vladimir Putin on board over imposing sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program. But such misguided optimism harks back to the Boris Yeltsin era, when the newly democratic Russia played a subordinate role to the West. If anyone needed more evidence that times have changed - and perhaps retreating to the antagonism of the Cold War days - they only had to listen to Vladimir Putin's state of the nation address on Wednesday...
...contrast could not be more marked between Putin's increasingly assertive stance vis-a-vis the U.S. and the pliant posture of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was always more popular in the West than he was among his countrymen, especially as they felt the effects of his reforms on their standard of living and watched their country's geopolitical status plummet in as little as five years from that of superpower to that of a harmless family drunk...
...grumbles about inflation, currently at about 12%. Apartment prices are soaring faster than in Shanghai or New York City. But for all its uncertainties, the Putin era seems less erratic than the tumultuous years of the previous decade, spanning the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Yeltsin-era crisis in 1998, which wiped out most people's savings. "Putin's our Teflon President," says Milekhin, pointing to a chart that shows how even potentially damaging events like the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004 haven't dented Putin's popularity...
Finally, a high-profile political appointee can send a strong signal to a nervous ally (or potential ally). A good example is Boris Yeltsin, who was delighted when Bill Clinton told him in 1993 that former Vice President Walter Mondale would come as the new ambassador. When Mondale changed his mind, Clinton sent Thomas Pickering, then the country’s most senior career minister, in his place. Yeltsin was furious, feeling he had been saddled with an apparatchik. He reportedly never trusted Clinton again...
...persecution may have actually helped Khodorkovsky's image in the eyes of ordinary Russians. Unlike other oligarchs who went abroad with the billions they'd amassed during the Yeltsin years, the Yukos tycoon returned to face a trial widely viewed as crooked, and ultimately prison. In many an eye, that may have transformed him from yet another sleazy oligarch into the latter-day equivalent of that Soviet-era icon of dissent: a prisoner of conscience. "The Kremlin has done free campaigning for him," quips legislator Alexei Mitrophanov...